Council housing is accommodation built by local authorities and let at below-market rents to people who need it. At its peak in 1979 it housed around a third of the British population, and it is one of the most consequential social policies of the twentieth century — and one of the most consequentially unwound.
Homes fit for heroes
The great expansion began after the First World War, with Lloyd George’s promise of “homes fit for heroes” and the Housing Act 1919, which for the first time required councils to survey local need and build.
Standards were deliberately high. The Tudor Walters report of 1918 specified generous room sizes, gardens front and back, indoor bathrooms and no more than twelve houses to the acre — a direct reaction against the back-to-backs. The resulting cottage estates, with their wide verges and semi-detached pairs, are still recognisable across Britain and are frequently better built than what came later.
Building accelerated enormously after the Second World War, which had destroyed or damaged around four million homes. Both parties competed on housebuilding numbers, and in the 1950s and 60s Britain was completing well over 300,000 homes a year, roughly half of them council-built.
The tower blocks
The 1960s brought system-built high-rise, encouraged by government subsidies weighted by storey height and by the speed of prefabricated construction. Some of it worked. A good deal of it did not — poor insulation, damp, lifts that failed, and no defensible public space.
The partial collapse of Ronan Point in Newham in 1968, after a gas explosion on the eighteenth floor brought down a corner of the building and killed four people, ended public confidence in system-built high-rise almost overnight.
Right to Buy
The decisive change. The Housing Act 1980 gave council tenants the legal right to buy their home at a substantial discount based on length of tenancy.
It was extremely popular, and it did what it set out to do: over two million households became homeowners who could not otherwise have afforded it. It is regularly cited as the most electorally successful policy of the Thatcher governments.
The problem was the other half of the arrangement. Councils were largely prohibited from using the receipts to build replacements, and the stock was not renewed. Social housing therefore shrank by millions of homes over four decades while demand did not.
Where it stands
Social housing — council plus housing association — is now around 16% of British homes. Waiting lists exceed a million households, temporary accommodation use is at record levels, and the shortfall pushes low-income households into the private rented sector, where rents are higher and housing benefit picks up much of the difference.
Right to Buy has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, and restricted in England.
Grenfell
In June 2017 a fire in Grenfell Tower, a council block in west London, killed 72 people. It spread up the outside of the building through combustible cladding fitted during a refurbishment.
The public inquiry found systematic failures by manufacturers, contractors, the council and regulators, and concluded that all the deaths were avoidable. It also documented residents’ repeated warnings about fire safety being dismissed — which is why Grenfell is understood in Britain not only as a building failure but as a failure to listen to social tenants.